Wait, apparently you can! As if six nauseating years of Peter Hartcher’s recurrent JBish hagiographies weren’t enough, the political editor – an indulged dinosaur of obsolete foreign affairs savoir-faire; a poor man’s Paul Kelly; Bob Carr without the abs – had his entire bureau (when it wasn’t out on strike) running her lines.

That the 45th Australian Parliament’s Liberal Party is crawling with reprehensibly chauvinist men does not absolve its female deputy of being an utter lightweight (just as her vigorously cultivated fashion celebrity never entitled her to lead it). Such a proposition, peddled by Nine’s metros like metronomes, is clottishly binary.

And here they go again: “Shorten considers Bishop for US Ambassador role” went Thursday’s SMH headline. In what parallel universe is Shorten doing any such thing? Principally the one confined by the four walls of Suite 116 on the Senate wing’s second floor.

Photo opportunity

Lamenting her cruel lot (ironically, in Adelaide) in taxpayer-funded life (ironically, to the Adelaide Festival), Bishop alleged that at the 2017 session of the United Nations General Assembly, Melania Trump mistook David Panton for the dignitary (he obviously hadn’t said very much) and Bishop for merely his lowly missus. The actual Foreign Minister was so incensed by the slight that she ... asked the First Couple for a photo; and she Grammed that baby so fast there was smoke wafting off her trigger finger.

“This story is false,” a spokesman for FLOTUS fumed 18 months later, on March 11. “It is sad to hear that Mrs (sic) Bishop felt the need to undermine the First Lady after Mrs Trump graciously invited her to her United Nations luncheon.”

Anyhow, Shorten dead set didn’t say he was considering Bishop for the DC posting Hockey is due to vacate in January. To the contrary, he actually referred to her own comments on Monday that “I’m not looking to get a government job. I’m very happy to pursue opportunities in the private sector.”

The Labor leader was charming 600 businesspeople in Perth, watched on by a couple of Hartcher’s scribbling disciples. It’s called playing to your audience (the “to” being optional).

Hartcher knows all about that. In the nick of time, he’s pivoted toPenny Wong, tomorrow’s Foreign Minister-elect (if Scott Morrison delivered a budget surplus next year, we can call her that, right?), her “gravitas ... something you cannot manufacture” and who “consistently has put the greater good over her own self-interest”. Oh, “And the self-deprecation is real”. Gaze upon access journalism in all its sick-making glory.